A Conservative Call for Civil Disobedience

A prominent U.S.
conservative author is coming out with a new book that calls for civil
disobedience.

The author, Charles Murray, says that the trend in government is always to
make ever more regulations, and only rarely do these rules get loosened or
revoked. The result is that our lives are choking on red tape. We’re restrained
from innovation and entrepreneurship by the justified fear that we’ll stumble
over some overlooked law and get taken down by some zealous bureaucrat.

The answer, Murray suggests, is for citizens to effectively nullify these
regulations through mass non-compliance backed by mutual insurance plans to
protect us against targeted government reprisals. This, he says, would soon
make those regulations null and void.

The civil disobedience + mutual insurance combination resembles what some
U.S. war tax
resisters do with their tax refusal + the
War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund.

It is nice to see civil disobedience getting a respectful hearing in
conservative circles, and I look forward to a time when the incessant gripes
about taxation on the right start getting accompanied by some actual refusal.

“Disobey!” reads the protest banner on an altered €5 note

Some tax resistance news out of Spain:

The Nueva Tribuna of Spain reminds its readers that “war is funded with your taxes,” and describes the latest war tax resistance campaign launched by pacifist and antimilitarist groups like Ecologists in Action.

Resist Tax; Are Killed.

Forty Natives of Padany Sumatra Fell Before Soldiers.

Amsterdam, May
22. — The natives of Panay Sumatra have refused to pay the new
tax levied upon them and are resisting every effort of the government to force
collection. Today they fought a battle with the troops and forty natives and
three soldiers were killed.

This is a little hard for me to decipher, in part because of the two spellings
of the location. There is a city called Padang in Sumatra, and there is also an
island called Panay in the Philippines. Both areas were, I believe, part of the
“Dutch East Indies” at the time.

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